"Hegel and Weber: From Transcendence to Rationalization " presented to CHEIRON: International Society for the History of the Social Sciences, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (May 29, 1976)

Gordon A. Welty
Wright State University
Dayton, Ohio 45431

ABSTRACT: Similarities between Hegel's, Marx's and Weber's thought are examined. Generically, the thesis of the possibility of transcendence differentiates Weber from the others. They differ on (a) the possibility of transcending bureaucratized capitalism through social revolution, (b) the consequences of closing the North American frontier, (c) the nature of the bureaucracy itself and (d) the capitalization of civil society versus the Rationalization of all social life. Alternative non-Hegelian and non-Marxian sources of Weber's thought are noted, including de Sismondi for undifferentiated "workers", Wm. Channing for the sociology of associations and oligarchy, and Th. Carlyle for the racial distinction of disciplined or metropolitan versus traditionalistic or colonial labor markets. Weber's theme of Rationalization is treated as the disciplining of that colonial or pre-capitalist labor force, augmented by the Protestant Ethic to assure the discipline of the bourgeoisie, generating Weber's vision of a totally Rational society within capitalism.

It has recently become popular to emphasize the similarities rather than the differences between Marxian and Weberian thought./1/ Such a reading itself has a long history, dating at least from the young Lukács' claim that orthodox Marxism entails no specific theses, but is method simpliciter./2/ Insofar as Weber could be understood dialectically, for instance as focussing upon the "ideal" as complementary to the "material" moments of the socioeconomic process, then the similarities of the two thinkers could be stressed./3/ It is no mean feat to propose to read Weber dialectically, but that is not our point.

We reject Lukács' early claim, as we take it he did himself./4/ We propose instead that Marxism entails at least one specific thesis, namely the thesis of transcendence. Weber, we will maintain, explicitly rejects the possibility of trancendence, hence the thematic of the two thinkers is categorially irreconcilable.

We shall first indicate briefly in what sense Marx meant transcendence, then consider, again briefly, the mistaken proposal that Weber too accepted the thesis of transcendence. Then we shall turn to the main portion of this essay, where we shall attempt to locate Weber's position in its intellectual heritage.

In Book 1, Chapter 1, Section 4 of Capital I, Marx considers the self-sufficient labor of a Robinson Crusoe, of a European feudal peasant, of a patriarchal agrarian regime, which is atomized into the interdependent and alienated labor and capital of civil society, which itself is transcended by the fully socialized labor, the perspicacious social relations of "a community of free individuals." The sense in which Marx meant transcendence is the sublating of civil society and its categories in the ethical community of direct producers.

Nolte has proposed that "Weber's real subject is identical with Marx's: practical transcendence." Nolte immediately withdraws this claim, as he quite correctly acknowledges that for Weber, the "history of alienation" is an "irreversible process which can never achieve a 'higher unity' with the individual."/5/ But this 'higher unity' is the essence of transcendence. Neurath had argued e.g. in his 1919 essay "From War Economy to Economy in Kind" that by the institution of soviets, transcendence was to be effected, and that "bureaucracy is replaced at every point." /6/ Weber replied to these arguments that "socialism would in fact require a still higher degree of formal bureaucratization than capitalism," which is to deny transcendence./7/

The contrast of Weber and Hegel regarding the possibility of transcendence is no less striking, if historically more concrete. In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel notes that the religious and other liberties which casually obtain in the United States could be traced to the immaturity of civil society, to the existence of the frontier./8/ When the frontier closes, civil society will differentiate and compact itself, the external state dictating the emergence of the political state, the ethical community./9/ Hegel does not amplify here upon his anticipations of the nature of the "actual (Wirkliche) state" and "actual government;" if we make categorially appropriate assumptions about his conception, the thesis of transcendence follows. The characterization of America as "the land of the future" manifests a striking optimism.

Weber also had occasion to comment on the significance of the closing of the frontier upon American political life. In his speech to the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, he argued that the exhaustion of free land in the United States, the rise of rents, would generate a "nobility," a "political aristocracy." This problem would appear in America, so Weber believed, "within only a few generations."/10/ This historical and political judgment is clearly incorrect, in good part due to Weber's failure to recognize (a) the capitalization and mechanization of agriculture which lowered farm prices, causing the ground rent of most American farms (agricultural acreage) virtually to disappear by the 1970's, i.e. within a few generations, as well as (b) the differentiation of agriculture into that heterogeneous industry called "agribusiness."

For our purposes, however, the significant consideration is Weber's supposition that the closing of the frontier was not a precondition of transcendence but of feudalism, i.e. reaction. Instead, the closing of the frontier has another consequent for Weber, the realigning of the several bureaucracies - the state, the armed forces, the church, and the educational institutions - to an alliance with this emerging "political aristocracy."/11/ Thus, the accuracy of his anticipations of a new feudalism for America can be put aside. Both in his opposition to Marx and to Hegel regarding the possibility of transcendence, it appears, then, that the discussion turns on Weber's understanding of bureaucracy, the apparent obstacle to transcendence.

There is the appearance of a striking parallelism of Weber's understanding of bureaucracy, and that of Hegel a century earlier. We have reproduced below the characterization that Weber gives of bureaucracy,/12/ alongside the appropriate statement of Hegel/13/ with some parenthetical explications added.

Weber

Hegel

I. There is a principle of fixed and official jurisdictional areas, which are generally ordered by rules, by laws or administrative regulations.

§ 290 Division of labor occurs in the business of the executive (or the chief official of the State and his administration)... the business of government shall be divided into its abstract (or rule-bound) branches manned by special officials as different centres of administration...

I.3 Methodical provision is made for the regular and continuous fulfillment of (bureaucratic) duties and for the execution of the corresponding rights; only persons who have the generally regulated qualifications to serve are employed.

§ 291 Between an individual and his (bureaucratic) office there is no immediate natural link. Hence, individuals are not appointed to office on account of their birth or native personal gifts. The objective factor in their appointment is (their) knowledge and proof of (their) ability.

II. The principles of office hierarchy and of levels of graded authority ... offers the governed the possibility of appealing the decision of a lower office to its higher authority ...

§ 295 The security of the State and its subjects against the misuse of power by ministers and their officials (i.e. the bureaucracy) lies directly in their hierarchical organization and their answerability...

II. Once established and having fulfilled its task, an office tends to continue in existence...

§ 293 ... while the actions of the officials (or bureaucrats) are the fulfillment of their duty, their office is also a right exempt from contingency (i.e. exempt from arbitrary intervention from above).

III. The management of the modern office is based upon written documents, "the files," which are preserved in their original or draft form.

§ 283 (A decision based on) the content of current affairs of state or the legal provisions required to meet existing needs (requires) their objective aspects, i.e. the grounds on which (the) decision is to be based, the relative laws, circumstances, etc. (This implicates what Weber calls "the files").

III. ...bureaucracy segregates official activity as something distinct from the sphere of private life.

§ 294 ...The assured satisfaction of particular needs (the bureaucrat's subjective ends) removes the external compulsion which may tempt a man to seek ways and means of satisfying (his subjective ends, his particular needs) at the expense of his official duties.

§ 296 (The education of the bureaucrat consists of) direct education in thought and ethical conduct. Such an education is a mental counterpoise to the mechanical and semi-mechanical activity involved in acquiring the so-called "sciences" of matters connected with administration (administrative science).

V. When the office is fully developed, official activity demands the full working capacity of the official ...

§ 294 The state does not count on optional, discretionary services... casual servants may fail for private reasons to fulfill their duties completely ...

VI. The management of the office follows general rules, which are more or less, stable, more or less exhaustive and which can be learned.

§ 291 The nature of the executive functions (as expressed in a bureaucracy) is that they are objective and that in their substance they have been explicitly fixed by previous decisions.

This "foreshadowing" of Weber by Hegel has not been widely recognized or acknowledged./14/ Was Weber himself aware of his debt to Hegel? There are several possibilities. On the one hand, Weber was never given to acknowledging his predecessors in print. On the other hand, both writers were reflecting virtually the same social reality in their theorizing about bureaucracy and the administrative apparatus of the State. As Marx pointed out in 1843, most of the paragraphs of Hegel cited just above could be found almost verbatim in the 1794 "Allgemeine Landrecht fur die Königlich preussischen Staaten."/15/ This legal code, the objectivization of the Prussian State bureaucracy, and that bureaucracy itself were virtually unchanged until the code of the new German Second Reich was effected New Year's day, 1900. Thus both Hegel and Weber, to the extent that they took this Landrecht and its foundation in Prussian social reality as The Bureaucracy, would say similar things.

But there are crucial differences between Hegel and Weber on the topic of bureaucracy. For the former, the political State provides each civil servant with an activity oriented toward a universal end (§264). Only if "duty" is taken abstractly, continues Hegel, would civil service amount to the "completion of duties" (§261 Zu). Insofar as these universal ends are taken correctly, and insofar as the political State exceeds a certain minimal size, the civil servant's subjective interests coincide with the universal ends, effecting transcendence (§296). It is important to emphasize that, for Hegel, the subjective interests subsequent to alienation are brought into coincidence with the universal ends; for Weber, there can be in general no such coincidence. Weber's approximation to the category of universal ends, "ideal" (wertrational) interests, is understood as necessarily involving "demands" which the actor feels a duty to oblige. Moreover, ideal interests are always irrational from the standpoint of the subjective interests./16/ Alienation, as the distancing of subjective interests and universal ends, is a permanent or intensive, and increasingly extensive, condition on Weber's analysis.

We can then turn from the topic of bureaucracy to more basic social processes to comprehend Weber's rejection of the possibility of transcendence.

II.
In the dialectic of household differentiated into civil society or the external state, moments which are sublated in the ethical community, we have two integers or extremes, the family or immediate substantiality of Geist and the political state as such. These integers have as a middle term, the system atomistic of civil society. The distinction is a sharp one between the ends in common of members of those integers, and the external interests of the burgher in civil society. Without common ends, the integers would not be communities, nor would they be integral.

This distinction of ends is itself grounded in the difference between two categories of activities in bourgeois society, productive and reproductive activities./17/ Let us elaborate. Productive activities are based on the separation of labor or agency from the means of production. Their history amounts to the increased distancing of initial production from final consumption, which distancing permits in turn the elaboration of the social division of labor and the intensive and extensive capitalization of the production process (cf. §§ 197-8). This cumulative transformation of the subjective and objective factors of the production process respectively, itself is the ground of the generation (hence "production") and appropriation of surplus value.

Reproductive activities, by contrast, are based on the identity of labor or agency and the means of (re) production; the differentiations are implicit here in the case of the family and are explicit in the case of the political State. The immediacy is the identity of (re) production and consumption in the household; mediated, it is the identity of service provision and receipt, as with professional educational, medical, legal and other services. Objectively, both moments of reproductive activities are characterized by the absence of capitalization. The family, for one, possesses capital (§170), but its activities as a household are uncapitalized. The civil servant or professional for the other, possesses knowledge and ability, which are themselves the means of reproduction (§291).

Weber's theme of Rationalization stands in stark contrast to the differentiations of objektive Geist just developed. Rationalization amounts to the cumulative separation of (in our terms, both productive and reproductive) workers from ownership of the pertinent means of production. The blue-collar worker is separated from ownership of capital goods; the soldier is separated from ownership of weaponry (the "means of destruction"); the bureaucrat is separated from ownership of the means of administration, hence activity in all spheres of life (liebensgebeiten) is disciplined and rationalized./18/ Rationalization then, for Weber, is a precondition not only of the modern factory or business enterprise, situated as it is in civil society, but the bureau, the technical institute, the university, the armed forces, and above all, the political state. The "comparable basis" of all these institutions is the unique exteriority of the equally unique inward basis of calculation or predictability./19/

Since the activities within the integers are not capitalized, it is meaningless to speak as Weber does of the separation of the generalized agent from ownership of the means of (re)production. Thus we have substantiated our introductory claim that the thematic of the two thinkers, Marx and Weber, is categorially irreconcilable./20/ If Weber's thinking is not an extension or elaboration of the Marxian and left Hegelian tradition, can we identify his heritage?

III.
A striking phenomenon of the first quarter of the 19th Century was the emergence of massive pauperism, coinciding with the expansion of the wealth of nations. It was commented on by the most astute observers of the time, including Hegel and de Tocqueville. It was noted by Simonde de Sismondi, who saw in it an undifferentiated tendency of bourgeois society: "All property tends to be divorced from every sort of labor." This tendency, de Sismondi believed, would soon place everyone in bourgeois society except for the great capitalists in the category of the proletary, the property-less./21/ Weber knew his de Sismondi; this is one moment of the heritage of the undifferentiated separation of all labor from their means of production and reproduction.

Another striking phenomenon of the first quarter of the 19th Century was the emergence of associations. Again these were commented upon by Hegel and de Tocqueville, and earlier by Hume./22/ In 1830, William Channing, the Anglo-American divine published his "Remarks on Associations" which had an immediate effect on English Liberal thought, influencing e.g. John Stuart Mill’s Liberty./23/ As part of Channing’s Works it was translated into German during the 1850’s. Moreover, it was widely discussed in Protestant circles; Nippold and others had summarized its major themes./24/ In sum, Channing was well known to the young Weber.

Channing makes six points worth reiterating here./25/

1. The proliferation of associations (or societies) is a peculiarly modern phenomenon.

2. "Our daily intercourse (in these associations) is with fallible beings, most of whom are undisciplined in intellect, the slaves of prejudice, and unconscious of their own spiritual energies. The essential condition of intellectual progress in such a world is the resistance of social influence... /26/

3. The extension of social interdependency decreases the "enslaving power" of any particular social influences. This becomes an argument for "extensive institutions" of public education.

4. "Natural" associations such as family and country are distinguished from "contrived" or "artificial" associations such as hospitals and orphan asylums, to the advantage of the natural associations. This point was echoed by Weber in his unremitting praise of the patriarchal nuclear family./27/

5. "Charitable associations, which weaken in men the motives to exertion, which offer a bounty to idleness, or make beggary as profitable as labor are great calamities to society, and peculiarly calamitous to those whom they relieve." /28/

6. Associations "accumulate power in a few hands, and this takes place just in proportion to the surface over which they spread."/29/ The instruments of this power are specified, particularly the accumulation of funds and control of sectarian publications and newspapers. The consequences of this power include (a) facilitating action of the powerful few and (b) producing dependency and passivity of the great multitude./30/

This final point interests us the most here, as it is a convenient starting point of the so-called "Iron Law of Oligarchy."

The separation of all workers from the means of production and reproduction on the one hand, and the centralization of power in associations on the other hand, for the joint purpose of disciplining every member of society (other than the great capitalists), are premises of the discussion of types of labor markets. In 1849 Thomas Carlyle had differentiated two types of labor supply behavior, the "emancipated" versus the "compelled." This was occasioned by the striking comparison of labor markets in the colonies and in the metropoles.

The "emancipated" behavior is exhibited in a labor market characterized by the backward bending labor supply curve of traditional or colonial society. As Carlyle described this situation in the West Indies, "A Black man, by working about half-an-hour a day can supply himself by aid of sun and soil with as much pumpkin as will suffice" /31/ whereupon the Black man, self-sufficient in pumpkins (= melons), ceases to work. And there is the problem for Carlyle: how to discipline the labor force.

"Compelled" behavior, by contrast, is exhibited in a labor market characterized by the monotonic labor supply curve of modern capitalist society. As Carlyle describes the situation in England, "you may buy work done with money: from cleaning boots to building houses, and to far higher functions,"/32/ there are laborers available and compelled by the interdependence of civil society for any work.

Carlyle is candid enough to acknowledge that "it is not possible to buy obedience with money," with obvious implications for the role of force in history./33/ This is made an argument for associations where centralized power ("Mastership") is used to "compel" the emancipated laborer to change his behavior to conform to the ("Servantship") requirements of modern capitalist society. Moreover, the laborer is denied self-sufficiency by separation from the means of production (in the case of the Black man, from the "sun and soil"). Let us briefly elaborate the analytical argument that underlies Carlyle's differentiation.

IV.
Supply curves of the amount of a commodity offered in any market manifest the disposition of the supplier to provide the commodity. Under most conditions of civil society these curves are assumed to be positively inclined (isotonic), so the quantity of that good or service which is offered increases as the price of the good or service rises. This is the so-called "Law of Supply" and is illustrated below in Figure I.

Figure I.

Given a day of length D, part of that day is the working day of length W, and the remainder is a residual time period D - W, generally referred to as "leisure time." The abscissa measures D, and W is given by the intersection of some wage-rate or income value Y with the isotonic labor supply curve rising from the origin.

But there is an important deviation from this law, where the supplier rather than continuing increasingly to offer the good or service in the face of price increases becomes instead a consumer of his own commodity. This is particularly to be expected where the amount of the commodity possessed by the supplier is limited.

For instance, the laborer who supplies his labor time in the market may prefer to consume his own labor time as "leisure." If the laborer is so situated that he may sometimes be a supplier of labor and sometimes a consumer, then the supply curve ceases to be isotonic with prices (or income) and indeed can become "backward bending" as illustrated below in Figure II.

Figure II.

Again the abscissa measures D, W and the residual of leisure time; the ordinate measures the wage rate. Above the wage rate where the supply curve becomes vertical, the laborer’s total income, the product of W x Y, is constant.

Weber imported this analysis into his discussion of the evolution of modern capitalism. He juxtaposes "traditionalism" (Carlyle's "emancipation") to "modern capitalism" (Carlyle's "compelled"), the former amounting to behavior giving rise to the backward bending labor supply curve, the latter amounting to behavior giving rise to the monotonic (disciplined) labor supply curve. In the situation of traditionalism the worker seeks constant income (as we have illustrated in Figure II): higher wages per hour induces less labor time supplied, to maintain the same income level./34/ In the situation of modern capitalism the worker seeks labor as an end in itself: higher wages per hour induces less time allotted to any other use,/35/ which is to say more labor time is supplied (as we have illustrated in Figure I). Finally, Weber insures that the great capitalist who manipulates (or at the very least, benefits from) the centralized power, himself is disciplined by the Protestant Ethic. Thus bourgeois society in its totality is disciplined and Rationalized for Weber, as even class distinctions vanish./36/ Needless to say, there can be no transcendence under such an analysis.

Weber's intellectual position has been enormously and perhaps surprisingly influential in recent social thought. We will take brief notice of two cases where we believe his influence can be ascertained. First are the self-styled Hegelianized Husserlians like Paul Piccone. He first manifested polymorphous strivings for "the overcoming of the intellectual emasculation of the concrete man" in 1967.

As with Weber, for Piccone, this required that "an institutionalized alienation must engulf the whole world... the whole planet."/37/ By 1974, we find him claiming that "the state penetrates every feature of civil society so as to become almost identical with it." This constitutes "the twilight of the classical dialectic between state and civil society [and] the end of traditional class politics."/38/ Of course Roy Ash has put the lie to these fantasies, a point that has not escaped Jack Anderson and many other observers.

Second are the self-styled anti-Leninist proponents of the "new working class." The American "new working class" for instance, consists of "most people in the United States, whether blue-collar or white-collar [who] do not own any of the means of production and must therefore work for a living."/39/ This glossing over of classical differentiations is based on a one-sided normative rather than complex substantive definition of "productive activity." Boyte and Ackerman go on to note that the concept of proletariat is preposterous, since "many factory products are essential to life; clearly, so are many non-factory products and services." The term "essential" is the clue here: the insights of classical social thought vanish before the Everlasting Ought. An implication of the Weberian undifferentiated workers separated from their undifferentiated means of production is that it is impossible systematically (or programmatically) to identify potential political agency as a function of location in civil society.

In sum, the reduction of classical social thought of Hegel and Marx to the sociology of Max Weber cannot, we have argued, be sustained. The reduction of alienation to a vaguely apprehended neurosis, the reduction of the agency of historical change to the shifting centers of power of party politics in bourgeois society, all of this is Weber's heritage. A careful reading of Weber, no matter how influential his writings may be, cannot be reconciled with Marxist thought.

Consider G. Lukács importing of Weber's doctrines of "imputation" and "objective possibilities" into discussions of class consciousness. Cf. Max Weber Methodology of the Social Sciences, Glencoe, Ill, Free Press (1949), p. 97, also pp. 164-188. It is doubtful that either the youthful or the aged Max Weber would have accepted this importation. Weber's unqualified contempt for the working class was expressed in his 1895 Freiburg inaugural lecture, where he claimed it was "petty bourgeois" as well as in his 1918 lecture "Der Sozialismus," now available in J.E.T. Eldridge, Max Weber: The Interpretation of Social Reality, New York: Scribner's (1974), pp. 210-211.

Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston (1966), pp. 447-448.
This suggests that Weber's relation to National Socialism is not yet resolved. On the impossibility of
transcendence, see also Ilse Dronberger, The Political Thought of Max Weber, New York:
Appleton-Century-Croft (1971), p. 231.

This is a rather striking anticipation of Frederick J. Turner's 1893 essay "The Significance of
the Frontier in American History," now available in his Frontier in History, New York: Holt
(1910). Cf. also Fulmer Mood "The Concept of the Frontier: 1871-1898," Agricultural History,
Vol. 19 (1945), pp. 24-30 and F. L. Paxson "A Generation of the Frontier Hypothesis: 1893-1932,"
Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 2 (1933), pp. 34-51.

Cf. Max Weber "The Relations of the Rural Community to Other Branches of Social Science," now
available in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, From Max Weber, New York: Oxford University
Press (1946), pp. 383-385.

It has long been recognized that the distinctions of the productivity of labor is
analytical, not at all normative. Cf. Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, New York: Oxford University Press (1954), pp. 630-631. In Marx's writings, the topic is treated most extensively in his 3 volume Theorien über den Mehrwert, the so-called "Vol. 4 of Capital." For specific references, see my "Professions, Police and the Future," in E. Viano and J. Reiman (eds) The Police in Society, Lexington: D.C. Heath (1975), pp. 253-258. Most definitively, the topic is treated in Capital Vol. 2, which we know from Engel's "Preface" was prepared subsequent to the manuscripts on the history of economic doctrines.

Contrary to Fischoff’s claim that Weber was "an heir...of the Marxist
tradition." Cf. Ephraim Fischoff, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism," Social Research, Vol. 11 (1944), p. 61.

J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi, Nouveaux principes d'économie
politique, Tome 2, Paris: Delaunay (1827), p. 124, p. 434. Engels was quite succinct in
rejecting the assumption that all strata intermediate to the two great classes might be
eliminated: "This condition does not exist even in England and never will exist – we shall not let
it get that far" (letter to Conrad Schmidt, 12 March 1895). This comment is also suggestive of the
nature of transcendence.

Cf. Max Weber's January 1909 letter to the Frankfurter Zeitung, now available as "The Academic Freedom of the Universities," Minerva, Vol. 11 (1973), p. 592.

Channing, op. cit., p. 147. Hegel's observations on this point (§ 245) are more interesting, involving a curious "underconsumption" argument. In any case, this concern for labor force discipline, so pronounced in Weber's work, is clear in Channing, and becomes an explicit moment of Weber's heritage to which we next turn.